NEW TIMES, NEW RULEBOOKS
Last, I want to talk about something new, something you all need to know when working with your friendly neighborhood FDOT (Florida Department of Transportation). It’s this: the rules have changed. Over decades, it always seemed like the DOT was always saying NO to the things local government leaders wanted, like safer streets and saner, right-sized, appropriate-speed streets. They would say, Madam Councilmember or Mister Mayor, we can’t do that, our one-size-fits-all rulebook doesn’t allow it.
First: Think back to the Happy Motoring era, the 1950s or 1960s, when many of us were born, and we didn’t know it but in those postwar years we were living in the last phase of the Golden Age of the Automobile. There was this forceful, national, propaganda-fed idea that “wider, faster roads [were] better roads.” That plugged into everything: budgets, manuals, high-octane federal subsidies; that was the era of “what’s good for General Motors is good for America” and it was a public works juggernaut. Traffic flow was… everything. Many other community ideals—like safety and strong property values, to name a couple—were de-prioritized. And you can understand it; who wouldn’t want to flow? Road widening, highway-building, and rebuilding, and re-re-building was the order of the day, and the motoring public was okay with huge amounts of the national treasury being spent on it. Old gasoline ads said, “Drive more, it gets cheaper by the mile.”
The innovations like cloverleaf interchanges and the fads, like one-way pairs, came fast. Yours is not the only town that got the one-way-pairs-and-road-widening treatment. It was seen as a way to squeeze a little more flow out of the intersections during the peak seconds of the peak hour. And, it seemed like a good way to spend all that federal money raining down on the states, even if we didn’t really have the traffic numbers to justify such wide streets “yet.” (You still don’t.)
Ironically, speeding everything up was exactly the opposite of making it safer and more efficient.
These roads became less safe and less hospitable because, outside the peak hour, all that extra asphalt provides a clear invitation to higher speeds. Remember, humans tend not to drive the posted speed, but rather the speed that feels comfortable given all the visual clues coming into your eyeballs through the windshield—and so if it looks like the Indianapolis Speedway, we drive as if we’re on the Indianapolis Speedway.
In turned out that in many cases the one-way pairs were undercutting their own on-paper efficiency, too, because if you have to drive twice as far and go out of your way and drive through five or six intersections instead of two, you’re doubling up the vehicle-miles-traveled per person and, while you’re getting turned around to get to your destination, you’re in my lane, when I’m in such a hurry, for whatever reason. You’re messing with my flow! No happy motoring for me.
Note: Fads fade, and many towns have been gradually undoing their one-way pairs and repurposing unneeded lanes, rebalancing flow against the whole range of other issues.
Now, back to the manuals.
The many consequences of the road-building binge include a terrible safety record, especially in the relatively new settlements of the Sunbelt. The biannual report, called Dangerous by Design, shows Florida every time as the champion state… at killing pedestrians. And of course, it’s not just people walking and biking getting killed, it’s the victims of car-on-car violence as well. We’re at the point where we’re killing 40,000 persons a year in our mean streets, and it’s a major public safety crisis. A leading cause of death among those under 25, for one thing. And where are more of those deaths and injuries occurring than anywhere else? Florida.
So a few years ago, embarrassed by the latest headlines on Dangerous by Design, the state Secretary of Transportation said, let’s fix it. He challenged his department to find a way out of the number one Death Machine status. He ordered the FDOT to rework all its rulebooks-- and they’ve done it. More info here.
They now have permission to say yes to things they used to dismiss, like safer design speeds and better lane geometries and all the features that aid safety. So remember this: You can get familiar with the new rules, and bring the District 4 FDOT engineers along with you on your search for better street designs. That way when they come around to do their resurfacing projects every 25 years or so, you can work with them to settle on designs that aren’t just resurfacings but meaningful redesigns.
The new rulebooks can be your superpower. For the nerds like me who might want to Google this and get into the tech of it all, search for FDOT FDM (Florida Design Manual) and “context classifications.” To make a long story short, it means, they no longer have to follow one-size-fits-all-- so they don’t have to treat a core downtown like it’s out in the distant sprawl strip or I-95.
I’ll conclude with one important admonition:
You need to do your best to arrive at local consensus first, and then re-engage FDOT. The Districts have been burned before, moving forward on the road diets and lane repurposings that the manuals now allow and even encourage, only to have the local folks reverse themselves and back out. So have some sympathy for your DOT officials, and have the conversation now.
Just having the conversation will bend the trend! So congratulations on what you’re doing with Let’s Talk Vero.
